The Quarterly Agricultural Outlook provides an overview of agricultural trends both globally and at the national level. Agriculture continues to be critical to India’s economy given its role in meeting the food and fibre needs of over a billion people and providing livelihoods to millions of households in rural areas. India is a major producer and consumer of several basic food commodities. The challenge is to meet the diversified and increased demand for food commodities as a result of the changing dietary preferences of the population. Imports meet a substantial share of the consumption of edible oils and pulses. The food inflation of the last two years has highlighted the need to watch the imbalances in supply and demand not just of food grains, but also of fruits, vegetables and milk, both in the short and long runs.
Agriculture continues to be critical to India’s economy given its role in meeting the needs of food and fibre for over a billion people and providing livelihoods to millions of households in the rural areas.India is a major producer and consumer of several basic food commodities. The challenge is to meet the diversified and increased demand for food commodities as a result of the changing dietary preferences of population.
The telecommunications sector plays an increasingly important role in the Indian economy. It contributes to Gross Domestic Product (GDP), generates revenue for the government and creates employment. The report presents the evolution of the telecommunications sector in India in the decade between 2001 and 2011. The total number of telephone subscribers has grown at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 35 per cent in this period. The comparable rates in the 1980s and 1990s were 9 per cent and 22 per cent, respectively. However, the composition of the subscribers shows that mobile subscribers have led the way. The increase in teledensity has mainly been driven by the increase in mobile phones. Demand side factors—ultra low cost of handsets, low tariffs and ultimately the ease of using a phone—as well as supply side factors have made mobiles popular in India. International comparisons show that India has one of the lowest mobile tariffs in the world. The majority of the subscriptions in India are of the prepaid type. Usage statistics also show that Indians talk more on the phone than their international counterparts. Teledensity shows wide regional variations across states. There is widespread variation in broadband availability across regions too.
This paper models the perverse impact of increased devolution of funds from higher to lower level governments (village councils or Panchayats) on tax revenues collected This paper models the perverse impact of increased devolution of funds from higher to lower level governments (village councils or Panchayats) on tax revenues collected by the latter. We show that transfers that do not adhere to the fiscal equalization rule will crowd out Panchayats’ revenue raising efforts. The extant literature has so far been unable to adequately explain the reaction of local effort to transfers from the higher level governments. Using a unique data set for India we theoretically model and measure the cost of taxation and use this and the ratio of transfers that augment the local wage rate to those that do not, after controlling for a number of village level characteristics, to explain tax collected at the village level. The estimation allows for mutual endogeneity of tax collected and transfers. We find that the cost of tax collection and the ratio of transfers that augment the local wage rate (to block grants) have a significant negative effect on tax collection, thus validating the conclusions of the theoretical model developed in this paper. Higher tax collection at the Panchayat level is associated with higher availability of village-level public goods. Several policy conclusions are advanced.
In this paper we show that investments to improve the supply and management of water reduce the time spent in fetching water by both men and women, which in turn will lead to a reallocation of the time saved to productive activities, and result in increased incomes. Using the national ARIS/REDS panel data of the NCAER we show that political reservations in the local government for vulnerable groups like scheduled castes and tribes, and women lead to greater local government investments in water supply and improved management. Political reservations are shown to increase the time spent by women in all productive activities, especially in self-employment in farm and non-farm activities. Increases in self-employment are shown to have the greatest impact among the productive activities on household incomes. We show that reservations also increase the wages that women receive in the rural non-farm labor market, which suggests that they reduce discrimination against women in labor markets
